Future of Democracy


London Design Museum
London, UK
2018




In 2018, the Design Museum in London challenged MA Material Futures to explore the future of manufacturing and emerging technologies. The Future Factories exhibition consisted of a series of interactive installations designed to inform and promote debate about the future we would like to create or avoid.

In The Future of Democracy, we investigated the role AI might play in making complex decisions for humans, and whether we might trust an AI to vote on our behalf. Visitors to the voting booth were asked a series of ambiguous yes or no questions in rapid succession and with no understanding of where their answers were being stored and what they were for.

The interactive performance challenged the idea of whether humans or machines are better suited to elect future leaders, and encouraged the audience to consider the gravity of the everyday voting they engage in online.

Project in collaboration with Maël Henaff, Marcel Nieto-Glowacki, Maria Roy Deulofeu, Emily Boxall, Pleun Van Dijk, and Akane Kawahara